Welcome to the very first ever weekly challenge! It’s was my week of my challange that Tate gave me. And it was a week of planing for ‘how to get my head into the game’… More
Recipe: Vegetarian Asian Noodle Thingy
The way I cook is the complete opposite of what I am — no fuss and simple. Few ingredients, quick to prepare, easy to reproduce. I usually poke my head in my fridge to inspect what’s hiding in there, and make up a recipe on the spot. The other day, I found carrots, leek, and zucchini, and so “Vegetarian Asian Noodle Thingy” came to be. It’s kinda Asian but not really. It’s “Slovenianized” Asian dish with shirataki (konjac) noodles and thinly cut vegetables.
Ingredients:
- 1 small onion
- 1 clove of garlic
- 1 (small) zucchini
- 1 carrot
- half of leek
- konjac noodles (or any kind of pasta)
- 1 egg
- olive oil
- soy sauce
- salt, pepper
- a pinch of sesame seeds
First, I minced the clove of garlic and the onion, and tried not to drown in my tears, then I cut my veggies into thin strips (zucchini, carrot) and rings (leek).
I poured 2 tb spoons of olive oil into the pan and turned on the stove. I threw in the onions and the garlic and when they turned translucent and soft, I added all the vegetables. Meanwhile, I cooked the noodles according to instructions and put them aside for later.
I added salt, a few tb spoons of soy sauce, stirred the veggies, and then made some space in the middle so I could pour in the egg I beat in a cup. I mixed the egg with the vegetables, added a little more salt, and threw in the noodles.
I cooked the whole thing for a few more minutes so the ingredients all mixed together, and then unceremoniously dumped the contents of the pan onto a plate. I sprinkled the sesame seeds (oh, and I stole some peanuts from Grams table and chopped them a little) and the peanuts on top, and tadaa, lunch was served.
The noodles are an acquired taste, lemme tell ya, rubbery and tasteless, but the whole serving was around 7 calories so I sucked it up, and by the end, I grew accustomed to the peculiar texture of the konjac noodles. I’m not completely sold on them, however, they’re a great substitute for pasta when you’re counting calories or just trying to eat healthier. Oh, and the dish as a whole was quite delicious, if I may say so myself.
Hats off to the cook! *wink wink*
FALLING OFF THE WAGON
There are a lot of ways to fall off the wagon. The most obvious (but not necessarily the most painful) is to literally fall off a wagon, but today I want to discuss the figurative missteps, stumbles and tumbles.
Falling off the wagon seems to be one of my favorite sports these days. If I pick up a good habit (for example, when I start to eat more healthily, drink plenty of water, or study regularly), I manage to keep it up for a while, and I’m doing great, but then suddenly I stop. I don’t just reduce the daily consumption of water, I don’t. Drink. A. Single. Glass. Of. Water. All. Day. And then a week. And then I just give up my good habit.
I asked myself the other day – why does that keep happening? Why does every road I take lead to identical results? I commit to something, and when things are looking as if they’re going to become a habit, a good habit, I fall off the wagon. And believe me, when yours truly falls, she doesn’t just walk away with a bruised butt—she also breaks a few bones and bleeds all over. But then she picks herself up, dusts herself off and tries again. (She also stops speaking about herself in third person because she realizes it sounds creepy.)
Self-destructing behavior is something we’re all pretty familiar with, amirite? I bet we’ve all come across a time or two when the self-sabotaging part of our brain takes over. Procrastinating, indulging in unhealthy food, alcohol, drugs; in one way or another, we’ve all done it once, twice, multiple times, or time and time again. The problem is, some people suddenly can’t—and most importantly—don’t want to crawl out of the hole they dug for themselves. And neither a helping hand nor a divine intervention can help with that because sometimes, the problem is not external, but in our head.
Take my blogging for example. I love to write, and I’ve wanted to start a blog for almost a decade now. And when Kate and I finally kicked each other in the butt and decided to create this outlet for our ideas, adventures and thoughts, my mind goes completely blank and I can’t put my pen to the paper and my fingers to the keyboard. Partly, it’s because I don’t possess any shred of discipline, but mostly because of this thing called self-sabotage. “You don’t have anything interesting to write about.” “No one cares what you have to say anyway.” “There’s no way you could keep this blogging thing up for more than a week so why even bother?” Gosh, my inner voice is such a bitch sometimes! So I do my best to keep her from speaking up, and I grit my teeth, put my war paint on, and I sit in front of the computer for *checks the time* the better part of two hours and write. And press delete. And keep on typing. Because—remember?—I pick myself up, dust myself off and try again.
It’s hard, being your own cheerleader, especially when there’s nothing you’d like to do more than crawl back into the ditch you ended up in when you fell off the wagon, but even though it seems a Sisyphean task, I do believe I can only achieve great things if I persevere. Since I want great things to happen to me in the future, I will continue working on myself, and hopefully, along the way, I will pick up better habits, ditch the bad ones, and get my lazy butt moving in the right direction.
With copious amounts of Muscat, because some bad habits are better than the others. Hee.
Cheerios,
Edinburgh through the eyes of a reader
Note to all the authors that have their books set in Edinburh or Scotland: I get it now. I do. I get it why you speak so highly of the city and the land. I get it now what you feel when you describe places through your characters’ eyes. I. Get. It. (I’m looking at you, Samantha Young, Karen Marie Moning, Diana Gabaldon, Julie Garwood, etc).
When in Edinburgh, me and Tate couldn’t grasp the beauty of the city and the culture and the people. I found myself thinking (on multiple occations) how I can picture myself living there and walking this streets every day. I can’t put into words how much I feel about this city.
As I mentioned before, Edinburgh through the eyes of a reader is fantastic. You might not know but On Dublin Street series by Samantha Young is set in Edinburgh and is also one of my favorite book series ever ever ever so of course I had to visit the streets she included in the titles.
It’s so much easier to picture the lifes of the characters now that I’ve seen the streets and how close to one another they lived. I know the book is fictional but it puts a smile on my face every time I think about those characters and their lives on these streets.
Yeah I know, Geek Alert!
But whatever. 🙂
My take on our trip to Edinburgh
My gooosh! What an adventure!
Like really. First let me tell you that this was the first time I went somewhere by plane and it was my first time like really abroad and definitely my first time in the UK.
Edinburgh was/is my by far favorite city in the world. I wanted to visit it for so long and I finally did.
But let me start from the beginning.
The plane ride. My gosh, I was so nervous! I don’t think it showed through my giddy excitement but I was so nervous. I couldn’t even sit still. I was constantly taking pictures out of the window even thought the scenery was pitch black with ocasional little lights of cities below. But who cares. Now I have like a hundred pitch black photos with little dots on them on my phone taken from the aeroplane.
When Tate and I arrived at the airport in Edinburgh we hitched a ride on a bus to the city centre. The first step we offcially took in Edinburgh was on Princes Street. And we were looking around this amazing buildings and all of a sudden in the middle of my admiration Tate say: “Oh my gooosh. Turn around.” I turned – and the Edinburgh Castle was the first thing I saw. All beautiful on the top of the hill all lit up with orange lights (it was midnight when we arrived).
The city is soo beautiful. Really, I can’t explain how beautiful it is. Everywhere you turn there is something to see. And every step you take there is some history to be told and a museum to visit.
We’ve been there for 5 days and let me tell you – it never rained! Never. It was sunny everyday. Somedays windy somedays not. It was trully perfect. And because I still can’t find words to say about the city I’ll just post some pictures I took insted.
I’ll be posting the places we visited and what we saw in the future. So if you’re interested make sure to come back later and check it out. 😉
How I Had To Break Up With Cheese (Part 2)
I really like cheese. I’m sure you must’ve picked up on this fact somewhere between the lines of my previous post. And the day cheese and I had to part ways… Well, let’s just say it wasn’t a nice, sunny day. There may or may not have been some tears involved, and cursing up at the sky.
But seriously, for a person who lived mostly off milk and cheese and yoghurts suddenly becoming lactose intolerant, this couldn’t have been more shocking. My life turned upside down.
I could no longer eat corn žganci drenched in milk. Or my cream cheese spread on bread. Or drink coffee with a healthy dose of milk. Or even simpler – eat a tub of yoghurt. I had to find a solution to my problems. So I did some research. A lot of research.
First, I tried all the possible lactose-free products – from milk to yoghurt and cookies. It was okay for a while, but after a few months, I started having terrible stomach pains and digestive problems after eating something containing lactose-free dairy products. I switched to a dairy-free diet, thus eliminating the majority of the foods that basically kept me alive.
And it took a lot of time for me to adjust to a new lifestyle. But I did it! I broke a habit. It wasn’t a bad habit, and I had to do it for health reasons, but it doesn’t matter. Through trial and error, I changed a habit. And that’s good, because it gives me hope for overcoming all the other bad habits that I do have, and need to eliminate from my life. Like cheese, which I love, but is not good for me.
That doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally indulge in a cheese pastry, or a Snickers bar. I later regret it as I’m laying on the ground in a fetal position, cursing at the world and swearing I’ll never do it again (but do it, because I’m a bad, bad girl, i.e. bad at having an iron will) BUT 99% of the time, I’m doing it. And hopefully, with the help of this blog, and my friend Kate, I’ll be able to break many of my bad habits, and pick up better ones. Also, I need to introduce discipline in my life, which I have zilch (case in point: me, eating a Snickers bar and later rolling in pain on the floor, knowing full well when I took the first bite, it was gonna be hell on my tummy). It’s going to take time, but time is what I have in abundance. Let’s do this!
Thoughts on why plus-size models are important
Candice Huffine
Iskra Lawrence
Chloe Marshall
Hunter McGrady
Nadia Abdulhosn
Denise Bidot
Ashley Graham
Candice Huffine, Iskra Lawrence, Hunter McGrady, Chloe Marshall, Nadia Abdulhosn, Denise Bidot, Ashley Graham are just some of many models I follow and adore. Why, you ask?
Well, it’s not just because I want to have a body like theirs and be pretty at all times but also because they’re the fighters in the front row to get the equality into fashion and model industry. They all have a lot to say to those who bodyshame them and these women prove they are not just a pretty face but that they have the brains and mouth to fire back at them.
They are the fighters in the front row –
even when bodyshamed they fire back. But not with negativity and childish banter and all that stuff but they prove to them that they are promoting a healthy lifestyle and that they are probably working out and staying in shape more and better than many of us do.
They prove to all of them body shamers and us who admire them that they don’t work out to lose weight and to “fit” in some category or some “body type”… They work out to stay healthy and to feel better. They are strong, independent women who prove to us that we don’t need to look a certain way to fit in and to feel beautiful. They prove that some celullite and some rolls and thick thighs don’t define our beauty. They prove that all women are the ones that are beautiful no matter our weight, our height, our size, our skintone. Nothing matters. We are all beautiful.
How I Had To Break Up With Cheese (Part 1)
You see, I’ve always considered myself a healthy, strong kid who spent their childhood playing in the dirt and helping on the family farm. I hung out with cows, cleaned after the pigs and worked on the fields and in the gardens. I ate home-made, home-grown food, sometimes plucked a carrot straight from the ground and ate it, or drank my cow Liska’s (pasteurized) milk-and I was tough, “stepped-on-a-nail-barefoot-and-cleaned-then-bandaged-it-and-hopped–back-to-stacking-firewood” kind of tough.
So imagine my surprise when one day, around 5 years ago, I drank a glass of milk, and promptly vomitted it all up. Of course, there were symptomes, like bloatiness after consuming cheese, or the overwhelming urge to throw up every time I made my smoothie with milk. I mentioned my suspicions to my doctor and he said to me, and I quote: “If you think you’re lactose intolerant, then avoid dairy products, and in two or three years, you’ll perhaps be able to consume dairy again.” And that was it. To this date, I haven’t been officially diagnosed, but since I keep throwing up after (accidentally) consuming foods with dairy ingredients I feel I can safely claim I’m lactose intolerant.
Of course, as much as it pained me, that was the end of my life-long love affair with cheese. Cheese of every kind and shape and form (except Emmentaler! Yuck.) Cheese for breakfast, cheese for lunch, a little cheese as midday snack, more cheese for dinner. Then, suddenly, no more pizza. No more cheesy lasagna or ‘burek’ with cheese.
I still miss cheese.
But, relationships end sometimes, and that’s just the way the cheese melts (and cookie crumbles). I learned to adapt–to evolve.
But more on that later.
PS.: Kate said this post ended a bit abruptly – but so did my relationship with cheese. Deal with it. Like I did. With large amounts of 75% dark chocolate, cause I wasn’t allowed to eat milk chocolate anymore.)
You can’t #hashtagplusblogger
Here we go. A couple of weeks ago I came across this awesome blog and had been reading all blog posts over there so there was a no brainer for me when Suger posted this challange that I want in too.
I didn’t do the previus challenges because my blog wasn’t set up then but now it’s up and running so here we go.
You can’t. As a plus size woman you’re not suppose to wear this or that or anything for that matter. Living in a country that I live in it’s so freaking hard where you don’t even have a plus size department in stores moreover a plus size store. Well I’d be lying if I said that so Imma refraze that. There isn’t a department or a store that has nice plus size clothes. Everything is shapeless and looks just terrible and ahh I’m getting of topic.
You can’t wear that. You can’t wear stripes. You can’t wear white you’ll look bigger in that. You can’t wear that tight shirt or skirt or whatever tight.. just no.
To hell with this. Why can’t I? Why shouldn’t I?
Seriously why shouldn’t I wear that?
I like it and I want to wear it and I feel good in it. So tell me why shouldn’t I wear something I really like?
I don’t wear shapewear, hell I don’t even own shapewear. So to hell with rounding out my stomach or whatever. I know I have body issues but that day I felt like wearing that. And I did. And I felt hella good in it.
Body Image
I just watched High Carb Hannah’s new video where she talkes about body dysmorphia and how she feels she failed at everything she does after losing so much weight and then gaining some of it back because she started lifting weights and all. You can watch her video HERE so you can see what I’m talking about.
I found bits of myself there. Why, you ask? Because something similar happens to me.
I’m trying to lose weight since my early primary school years. I was always the bigger one in my class. In height and in weight, and my weight always varied up and down. I was never skinny or small. But I wasn’t obese either. I was just bigger than anyone my age.
But back to the point of what I wanted to say in this post. As I was watching Hannah’s video I thought to myself I have something similar happening to me.
But it’s the other way around than her. She feels like her body is bigger than it really is. I have the opposite. My mental picture of myself is that my body is smaller than it really is but as I look myself in the mirror, I get not horrified, but close or sad would cover the feeling I feel then.
I think it has something to do with my body confidence or lack thereof. To get really real right now: I can’t stand myself when I look at myself in the whole-length mirror.
And it’s so hard to think about this. I want to wear that dress today. And I want to wear those heels with it. And i’m going to do my hair and make-up and go out and feel good about it all. But as I get ready and am all done up to leave the house I go and check myself out in the mirror. “You look horrible,” I think to myself.
“I can’t go out like that”. Not that I’m dressed inappropriately or anything. I just feel like some gianormous thing wearing a dress or a skirt. So I go and change back to jeans and some big, comfy hoodie and go out like that. Forget the dress. Forget the heels. Jeans and hoodie. Done.
It would be all good if I wouldn’t go and checked myself in the whole-length mirror. Probably.
But then again: my mind would go mad if I didn’t. Because I have to take a final look and see what I look like all done up.
I know this is not rational from my perspective. I know I don’t look that bad and I know that I look good in that dress and in those heels… But, gooosh, it’s hard to step out of my comfort zone.
I know it’s all just in my head and the reality of things is different than the picture in my mind.
I need to get myself under control again. And I need to think better of myself. I need to work on my body image because I know I’m better than this thing that is happening everytime I look in the mirror.
Coffee Is My Life Force
Coffee coffee coffee
I can’t imagine a day without a cup of coffee. Seriously – I don’t. Not that I need it like a crazy person just to wake up in the morning before I start the day. No. I just enjoy my coffe soo much that I don’t go a day without it. Because a day without a coffee is a day lost, and the truth is don’t start real talks with me without a cup of coffee in my sistem.
I think coffee talks are the most important. Well, at least that goes for me and my friend. There is always some serious talk while sipping coffee in the pub we always go after grocery shopping on a Sunday and it is the
same pub we usualy complain that the coffee there is not soo good and how we are never going back. But we always go back and always do the same thing over and over and over again 😀 (I guess the coffee there isn’t so bad after all if we keep on going back).
Recently, I bought myself a kafetiera Bialetti Moka Express and let me tell you this: Oh. My. Gosh! This is what I call coffee. No coffee maker gives justice to this coffee right here. (Well that might be a bit harsh but it’s just the way I feel.)
Best. Coffee. Ever.
Breaking Habit 